When you want to turn on the dishwasher, but it's not quite full, so you're feeling just a slight bit of environmental guilt, and then you insert the last few things extra inefficiently so it *looks* more full than it really is, and you congratulate yourself with a job well done and turn the […]

Wil je mij horen spreken over het oneindige? Dinsdag 14 oktober in Leiden! https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/agenda/2025/10/de-eindige-mens-in-de-oneindige-wereld

This arrived in the post today! My real actual physical book. 🥳😍😱😱😱

That Kimmel monologue was fine, but (a) boy did he kiss some corporate ass, and (b) we're in trouble if free speech is to be guarded by the likes of Disney.

I just read some reports that show that in 2024, Dutch police officers shot their guns 214 times. (All of them together, I mean.) Of those 214 shots, 194 were to kill a grievously wounded animal. Of the remaining 20 shots, 8 were shots at an aggressive animal. So there were -- I assume -- 12 […]

In two days my book comes out! (A Dutch book about the philosophy of infinity). I'm REALLY NERVOUS! But about what? Reviews, most likely? Not sales, I don't think so. But I'm not even sure whether there will be reviews, or when they would appear...

I live on the world's largest island.

My first year philosophy students have to read a primary text for next week, the first two Meditations of Descartes. I said: "I want you to read the text well enough to not understand it." The problem with superficial reading is not that you miss details, but that missing those details allows […]

So help me, I laughed #shitpost #meme #distractedboyfriend

In plaats van 'het heelal' schreef ik zojuist per ongeluk 'het helaas'. Wat zegt dit over mij.

A new Thomas Pynchon book is coming in October! A few of my heroes are still alive...

when you sleep that's your body turning you off and on again to see if it fixes the error

In the Netherlands, the supermarkets stay open even on Christmas Day. In France, they close for... the Assumption of Mary, a Catholic holiday I didn't even know existed? Obviously I learned this the hard way, by standing in front of a sequence of closed shops this morning. 🙈

If you like the experience of hostile people explaining incomprehensible rules to you in a language you only had understand, go to a municipal swimming pool in France!

I'm reading the second Dying Earth book by Jack Vance, and it's quite good, but there's a scene where the protagonist basically engages in rape, and that's where the detached ironic tone starts falling flat. I get that we're not asked to allow admire Cugel, but surely we should like spending […]

The 9yo, a fervent atheist, read a Lego comic version of the New Testament (it covered the gospels, Acts, and, at length, Revelation). Yesterday, he told me that he wished he hadn't read it. "Now I'm afraid of God! Even though God is nonsense. So I'm afraid of nonsense!"

I'm now halfway through this biography of Leonard Cohen, and he has not yet written a single song. 😂 I did learn that he wrote a lot of poetry and two novels! Did anyone here read those? Are they worth seeking out?

het leven is een rolgordijn je rolt het op en dat doet pijn

5/5 Perfect Airbnb, clean, great location, just as advertised. Owner might seem a bit creepy at first but he's actually a swell guy, certainly not an axe murderer who is using my servered index finger to unlock my phone and post this review!

I had forgotten -- or repressed -- that the Book of Revelation is a mentally disturbed guy's ultra-violent revenge fantasy.

I'll be going on a fairly long holiday, but this is probably still too many books to take with me... choices, choices! (Or I could just cram books between all the suitcases when I'm packing the car.)

We were at school for the periodic parent / child / teacher conversation. Teacher to 7yo: 'Sometimes when I give you feedback about something you didn't do well, you immediately start crying.' 7yo: 'Yes, because you are angry!' Teacher, in a friendly, conspiratorial voice: 'Not really. I'm […]

WHO JUST SENT HIS BOOK MANUSCRIPT TO HIS PUBLISHER?! That would be me. 67000 words, in Dutch, about the philosophy of the infinite. Phew! Of course, now comes the most scary part -- actually sending it into the world and having other people read and judge it. I believe it's supposed to come […]

Having a mathematician read my chapter on infinities in mathematics has given me much better insight into the *enormous* chasm between mathematical and philosophical thinking! 😅 Example. 'You get the empty set for free.' Mathematician: Of course not, you need an axiom or proof to establish its […]

I'm a device that turns tea into philosophy.

Three times a week of so I have to remind myself of this pair of Dutch/English false friends: paragraaf (Dutch) = section (English) paragraph (English) = alinea (Dutch)

Okay, so, I just read a text that suggested to me that in the USA, if you bring your kid to another kid's birthday party, you are supposed to hang around *for the entire duration of that party*, rather than just dropping them off and picking them back up four hours later. Is this truly the case? […]

With these NATO spending goals in place, I've got a new strategy for acquiring research funding.

Ik weet niet precies wat mijn studenten op de middelbare school wel hebben geleerd, maar correct d/t gebruik in ieder geval niet. 🙈

I always hated over-the-board blitz/rapid #chess, because I was really bad at it and would blunder pieces left and right. But I recently started playing online chess with Lichess. And blitz/rapid works really well online. So I started playing a lot of fast games. A month ago, I had a Lichess […]

Wikipedia has a cheat sheet of well-known tells for identifying generated text. (With an appropriate warning not to over-index on minor ones as absolute proof) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_AI_Cleanup/AI_catchphrases

Friends in or around #france. I'm looking to buy a fairly obscure French hiking guide, 'Chemin des châteaux forts d’Alsace'. There's a bunch of people selling it on Amazon.fr, but I don't want to put money in the pockets of Bezos. What are good French alternatives for used (and new) books?

Don't you yearn for a God to disobey?

Made it to the top of one of our local mountains, the Amersfoortse Berg. 💪🥾 Good training for my upcoming holiday in the Swiss Alps.

I'm really enjoying @organicmaps as an app with unlimited OpenStreetMap usage and great GPX import of hiking routes. But I can't find a manual! So just in case there are any users here who can help me out: 1. When you are recording a route, is there a way to show how many kilometers you have […]

Fokke and Sukke cartoon, national Dutch newspaper NRC. Translation: Fokke and Sukke lead the attack on Iran. "Yeah, pretty stupid." "We actually wanted to bomb a hospital, three kindergartens, and a refugee camp."

Ik kijk naar mijn keuken en denk: volgens mij zijn de kaboutertjes weer aan het staken.

The 8 o'clock news of the Dutch public broadcasting, the most watched news show (and TV programme) in The Netherlands, just stated in its analysis of the aid situation that Israel is engaging in systematic genocidal conduct.

Good news from the Netherlands today. Looks like governing was too hard for the far-right populist... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/03/netherlands-government-collapse-geert-wilders

My philosophy article 'How (not) to judge a theory of causation' has just been cited by an article titled 'Family firm culture’s influence on socioemotional wealth and financial performance in single-family-owned food processing firms' in the African Business Management Journal. The sentence […]

I don't know what you awesome guys and gals are doing with your evening, but I'm writing about infinite ordinals for my Dutch popular philosophy book, and I'm loving it. (I wonder how often someone tried to explain abstract order types in a popular book. But this *can't* be a bad idea! I'm sure […]

Songs from my music collection that my 7yo daughter really likes: - Yemi Alade, Mami-Water - Hang Youth, Je haat niet maandag je haat kapitalisme - Ghost, Call Me Little Sunshine - The Ramones, I Wanna Be Sedated - The Gathering, Strange Machines That's at least one part of parenting that I'm […]

I'm enjoying this massive Microsoft own goal. My son couldn't log into Minecraft on Windows because of some stupid Microsoft authentication error. I tried contacting support, but they basically make this impossible. So I ended up installing dual boot Ubuntu on his PC, and now he's playing […]

Why is apparently seen as acceptabele in #academia to go to a talk, open your laptop, and then work on totally unrelated stuff while the speaker is talking? I find this unbelievably rude, but I see it all the time.

My students made this. No further comment.

Needing groceries and standing in front of a closed supermarket: the classic method for finding out about nationaal holidays! (Apparently, Labour Day is a thing here in Germany.) (Being too late for breakfast in a Boston hostel was how I found out that the US switches to daylight saving time […]

[NYT Strands solution] What on earth do these words have to do with each other? I'm not seeing it.

You know what's even worse than pineapple on a pizza? Mango in a pokebowl.